Google Promises 'Highest Quality' Tablet in 2012

Chairman Eric Schmidt praises the late Steve Jobs but vows there will be a 'brutal competition' between Google and Apple in the mobile market in 2012.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt said this week that the company will produce an Android tablet of "the highest quality" in the next six months to better compete with Apple's market-dominating iPad. In an interview published Monday by the Italian-language Corriere della Sera, Schmidt praised the late Steve Jobs as "the Michelangelo of our time" but promised a "brutal competition" between Google and Apple in mobile communications and the smartphone market.

Jobs was "[a] friend of mine and a unique character, able to combine creativity and visionary genius with an extraordinary engineering ability," Schmidt said in a Google translation from Italian of the Corriere della Sera interview. "Sometimes you find people who have one thing or the other, but not the two together. Steve realized the revolutionary potential of the tablet and created an amazing product [in] the iPad. ...

"But our companies compete ... in the next six months, we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality. And in mobile communications and the smartphone market, you will see brutal competition between Apple and Google Android. It's capitalism. "

It wasn't clear from the interview that Schmidt was referring to a tablet built in-house by Google, though some tech sites inferred that the Google chairman was talking about just such a device that would be stamped with the company's Nexus brand, which to date has only been used for Android-based smartphones.

Schmidt told the Italian newspaper that Google already has "the best voice translation software" in the business but that "we must develop it" to "use it to do things similar to Siri," Apple's popular digital assistant introduced with the iPhone 4S.

He also spoke at length about Google's YouTube business, which he was careful to say would remain separate from the company's television efforts with Google TV.

"YouTube will be more profitable because it will have more publicity," Schmidt said. "But it will not be televised. ... [T]he business model of YouTube is different [from television], it's to help people make money with content that is produced and distributed independently, but on the Internet. Even the new channels that we are creating are for the Web.

"Of course, it's true that people often prefer to follow these channels on the Web instead of watching television, but they are two different things. We have a strategy to allow the user to combine them together, but that's part of Google TV, which will arrive in Europe in the first half of 2012. "

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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